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Back Burner Projects

Here are some cool things that I have been brainstorming about, but have not had the chance to complete, usually due to the lack of resources or time.

These are projects that are important to me, that are just not feasible to implement right now. Once I have the necessary resources, I will start these in earnest. Some of the profits and revenue from my other projects will eventually be rolled into developing these projects.

My goal is to work on these one at a time, launch them and them put a team in place to maintain them.

The projects are:

WisTex KIMS™ (Knowledge and Information Management System)

Managed Private Label Knowledge Base System

Digital Authorship

WisTex Planner & Sync

If you want to help me kick start these projects sooner, become a patron, purchase one of my other products or services, or contact me with other ways you could help.

WisTex KIMS™

Stage: Mock-up

Having built and/or maintained many knowledge bases in my career, I see the need for a new kind of knowledge base that does more than just display articles to users. So instead of just a knowledge base, we create a Knowledge & Information Management Systems (KIMS)™ that manages the whole process of managing content, from draft, to approval to publishing, all in one piece of software. It will be easy enough for teams to publish their own content, while allowing management (or their delegates) to approve policy and compliance related content before publishing. Different content can go through different approval processes (after all fixing a typo does not need the same approval as posting a new company policy).

Combine that with some navigation enhancements and excellent search functionality, and we have a pretty solid system. Plus I have some innovative features I won’t reveal yet for making sure the information stays up to date and making it easier to manage.

This solution is targeted towards organizations that managing their KB with a team. I would like to initially offer it as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), but might offer a self-installed option to large corporations who need something internally.

Right now this project is in the mockup stage. I know what I want to build, and know what it needs to look like, and what it needs to do, however, a working prototype has not been built yet.

What’s missing is programmers. I either need to find time to program this myself (including learning some new skills for advanced features I don’t know how to implement yet), or find some programmers to help me finish this.

Managed White Label Knowledge Base System

Stage: Experimentation

I don’t have a cool name for this one yet, but it basically it is a solution for organizations that wish to outsource all or part of their knowledge management needs. It is a combined software and content solution, where we provide the software to run and manage the knowledge base, and also give them the option of creating and managing the content themselves, or having us hand all or part of that for them.

Customer would be able to:

Manage content themselves.

Have us manage custom content for them.

Purchase content packs of pre-created content.

Or any combination of these.

We are currently experimenting with open-source and customer written software to create a simple version of this, however would eventually want to offer WisTex KIMS™ as the underlying software.

This is a more ambitious project that would require programmers to create the software, and additional technical writers as the service scales.

Digital Authorship

Stage: Experimentation

There are two major issues in the area of content today:

Poor quality content is overwhelming quality content, making it hard to find quality content, especially content from those who are unknown. Content discovery should not be a popularity game, or based on how much a content creator can pay. It should be based on quality content.

Current search and content discovery algorithms focus on websites and individual pieces of content, and neglect the author of the content. The reputation of the author for delivering quality content should be one of many factors in predicting quality content, and writers and content creators should get credit for the work they create.

Digital Authorship takes the concept of Google Authorship, which millions of websites and authors actually adopted, and take it to the next level. Google may have discontinued Google Authorship because a few million people are not enough for them, since they are only interested in the huge projects that impact huge number of people. For them a couple million users is a niche market they are not interested in. but I am content with millions of users, even if they aren’t. The demand for this is out there. It’s just a matter of building it.

It won’t entirely be like Google Authorship, because I believe they could have attracted even more users if they had done certain things differently. So I do have some tricks up my sleeve.

Right now I’ve created some mock-ups, and am even experimenting with some implementations. Needs some major programming to implement it the way I want to implement it.

WisTex Planner & Sync Utilities™

Stage: Brainstorming & Research

I have always been frustrated by the state of productivity solutions out there. There is actually a lot of really great stuff out there, but most of them do one thing well, and miss other areas entirely. If only they could talk to one another.

I am a visual person, and I am a planner. And I hate wasting time, especially if that involves doing things that could easily be automated by software.

So, I want simple visuals where I can see my progress and keep me focused. I also want the complexity of a project management system where I can plan complex team-based projects and track the team’s progress. I also want unique interfaces to make it easier to interact with the milestones projects and tasks. Sometimes looking at the same data a different way can help you focus better, or see what is missing. There needs to be privacy controls so that only the right people see the right information.

It also needs to be motivational. Make it fun, while making it personalized for each person. So this means gamifying some of the elements, as well as allowing users to create their own life path, goals and motivations. But rather than creating gamification elements that don’t mean anything in the real world, tie achievements to real world events, like tasks completed, milestones reached, revenue generated, etc. Whether it be running 10 miles, or developing a new habit, or working on a project, or launching one’s business, it should matter in the game.

And it shouldn’t be a burden. That means no unnecessary copy and pasting and extra clicking, and means information gets synced or integrated so it doesn’t have to be reentered.

And ideally it should use some of the great stuff out there. So instead of reinventing some of the great stuff already out there, how about syncing with as much as we can. We definitely need a dashboard and some great visuals, but some of the stuff we will have to create ourselves.

This would give people choices on how they interact with the system. For example, some people might like Redmine, while others like Basecamp. and another uses Toggl. Some use Agile, Kanban, Pomodoro and many other techniques to improve their productivity. Ideally, team members would be able to work in the environment and software they prefer, while unifying information, progress and statistics into one dashboard.

This project is, by far, the most ambitious project I hope to one day complete. I hope to find a solution for this, or build the solution myself.